Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

I will begin by confessing that I’ve never been a drug user. I drink alcoholic beverages; I used to smoke cigarettes/vape; but the closest experience I have to drug use was getting contact high at a party. I confess this because I don’t have the personal knowledge of what it’s like to be on “drugs” but I also have a good idea that Warnke doesn’t either. This entire next section reads like someone trying to convince us way too hard that he was on drugs. The biggest clue is that I have plenty of alcohol experience and Warnke’s description of drinking doesn’t make sense. He knows that people who drink too much vomit, so in order to convince us that he was totally drunk all the time, we left off with him leaving class to go throw up. What Warnke doesn’t understand is that if you’re so drunk that you feel the need to throw up all the time, you also aren’t going to be able to do many other things—like walk around, attend classes, or convince someone that you aren’t drunk. I know that somet...

  We’re in California and Mike Warnke is a bit bored. Not actually bored because he’s going to parties, clubs, bars, cafés, and hooking up with either one girl or many girls. He, however, claims to be bored because he needs a reason to claim that he began drinking. I don’t know what the word is, but Warnke is “regret bragging.” This is when someone acts regretful about their past behavior but also touts how good they were at it. He drank so much and hooked up with so many girls he knew was wrong, but he was just so awesome at it. Last post he was going back to visit his relatives back in the Midwest. If you’re thinking that he’s going to have a confrontation with his Protestant aunts, you are thinking just like I did, and you would be wrong. His trip back is covered in a sentence where he notices that his life in California was just so much better. Mike, however, can’t just enjoy his life. He’s got to be a gadfly to the Catholic religion teachers that he was so enamored with tw...

  Writing a long narrative is difficult. You have to keep track of many different things, especially when you’re dealing with internal thoughts. I keep a small B5 sized notebook for important notes when I’m writing. It would have served Warnke to do something like this too because chapter 2 has a few contradictions that simple note taking would have resolved. “California isn’t a state, it’s an experience.” I think Governor Schwarzenegger used this as a slogan, which makes me think that Warnke didn’t come up with it. Warnke has left the Midwest and is now living in (or near) San Bernadino California with the Papists. The first few pages he’s describing the San Bernadino valley and it’s not a bad job of laying out the environment. I might be overly picky here but I think that this belonged in the chapter where he moved to California. I get that he’s setting the stage for the California bit, it seems like he realized he forgot like a a person telling a joke and then going back “t...

  “ They made dark threats about fire and brimstone if I didn’t shape up to Jesus. “Who’s that?” I wondered. One of my favorite questions to ask Christians who are trying to convince me with Bible quotes is, “Who do you think isn’t aware of Jesus?” If you live in an English-speaking country and have not heard about Jesus I’m very curious about you. I’m an atheist, my children do not go to church, and they know about Jesus because they live in a Christian culture. Warnke lives in the Midwest and even if his dad was the gun-toting badass that Warnke portrayed him as, he knows who Jesus is. The “they” in that sentence are Warnke’s two aunts who are going to raise him after the funeral. This is the 1950s and I guess custody just goes to whoever calls “dibs.” The aunts have him to fill with fear of Evangelical Jesus when in 1959 Warnke’s half-sister and husband explain to the aunts that they had secret dibs and were going to take Mike to San Bernadino California. There’s just one pr...

We begin our long journey. A couple of reminders for those of you who missed last week: the first is that I’m entirely aware that Mike Warnke is making most of this story up, there will be no need to remind me of that in the comments. The second thing is that for the most part I’m going to take the story he’s telling here at face value. This is because conspiracy books like this rarely hold up against themselves. This blog has covered 8 conspiracy books over several years and several different blog sites (the wordpress.com link is the oldest) and through that I can say one of two things happens: either the conspiracy begins unraveling due to the author’s incompetence (as in the case of Nesta Webster’s book that we just finished) or the conspiracy just descends into absurdity (Kaysing’s We Never Went to the Moon is a good example of that). The final note is that all page numbers are from the pdf not the book itself. I am using this version found at the internet archive . Preamble over...

Our next book is going to be the 1972 “memoir” The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke …with David Balsiger and Les Jones. I’ve chosen this book for a few reasons. The primary reason I’m choosing this book is that it’s the first domino in the debacle that will be called “The Satanic Panic.” We know the Satanic Panic from the 1980s and 90s; but the origins of it go back to the 1970s. During the 1970s a few things come together to create this panic that would sweep through the English-speaking world. The sexual revolution is one, I don’t have the expertise to really speak on the causes of the revolution, but I can write about the effect—women wanting to work…well not work, no one wants to work. They wanted autonomy and to break the chain of having to be considered a housewife. Once they left the house in pursuit of their own lives, someone needed to watch the kids and Christian men in 1970s America would rather be damned than raise their own children. The response was to scream about how wom...